Chuck is the author of the published novels: Blackbirds, Mockingbird, Under the Empyrean Sky, Blue Blazes, Double Dead, Bait Dog,Dinocalypse Now, Beyond Dinocalypse and Gods & Monsters: Unclean Spirits. He also the author of the soon-to-be-published novels: The Cormorant, Blightborn (Heartland Book #2), Heartland Book #3, Dinocalypse Forever, Frack You, and The Hellsblood Bride. Also coming soon is his compilation book of writing advice from this very blog: The Kick-Ass Writer, coming from Writers Digest.

He, along with writing partner Lance Weiler, is an alum of the Sundance Film Festival Screenwriter’s Lab (2010). Their short film, Pandemic, showed at the Sundance Film Festival 2011, and their feature film HiM is in development with producers Ted Hope and Anne Carey. Together they co-wrote the digital transmedia drama Collapsus, which was nominated for an International Digital Emmy and a Games 4 Change award.

Chuck has contributed over two million words to the game industry, and was the developer of the popular Hunter: The Vigil game line (White Wolf Game Studios / CCP). He was a frequent contributor to The Escapist, writing about games and pop culture.

Much of his writing advice has been collected in various writing- and storytelling-related e-books.

He currently lives in the forests of Pennsyltucky with wife, two dogs, and tiny human.

He is likely drunk and untrustworthy. This blog is NSFW and probably NSFL.

Chuck Wendig is a novelist, screenwriter, and game designer. This is his blog. He talks a lot about writing. And food. And pop culture. And his kid. He uses lots of naughty language. NSFW. Probably NSFL. Be advised.

How To Be A Full-Time Writer

Fact is, a lot of writers work day-jobs unrelated to writing. And there is, obviously, nothing wrong with that. I did that for many years myself, and though it can be tricky, it guarantees stability.

For me, though, the dream was always to pack the cubicle farm walls with C4 and blow them sky-high. So, this is about that. This is about fulfilling the dream of working as a full-time writer.

Please to enjoy.

1. Best Get Mad Skills, Son

That might be “skillz,” with a ‘z.’ Sorry for any negligence on my part. The point remains the same regardless of spelling — you cannot survive as a full-time writer without the skills to back it up. You can’t just one day up and decide to make a living as a hard-workin’ trench-crawlin’ penmonkey if you cannot write well. Know your stuff. Get to a comfortable level. If you can’t play baseball, you don’t join the Phillies. You don’t join the CIA if you can’t fire a gun and spy on dudes. Don’t attempt full-time writing without first learning your craft. If you leap into the dark chasm, don’t forget to bring a flashlight.

2. The Slow Detachment

Most successful full-time writers don’t one day roll out of bed, brew a cuppa joe, then tell their day job boss to eat a bucket of whale dicks and then declare themselves the President of Writerland (capital: Inkopolis, population: one deluded penmonkey). Start by building a resume. Write part-time. Earn some cash. Then earn more. Gather clients and publishers while also writing some material for yourself. Build to it.

3. When To Punch The Eject Button

The best sign for when it’s time to take the leap? When your day-job is officially holding you back from earning out. When you’re able to say — based on evidence, not liquor-fueled guesswork — “Man, if I wasn’t working 40 hours at the Big Dan Don’s Nipple Clamps And Taintscratcher Half-Price Market, I’d start making some real coin at this inkslinger gig,” then you know it’s time to start pulling away from the day job.

4. Waggle Your Toes In Those Part-Time Waters

Diving into a cold pool or sliding into a hot jacuzzi, you ease in so as not to shock and/or scorch your privates into crawling back into your body. (Actually, I wouldn’t get into a jacuzzi. You ever check out the water jets on those things? It’s Hepatitis-City. All varieties: A, B, C, X, Z, Prime, v2.0, Exxxtreme Triple Nacho, etc.) Hepatitis aside, it helps to have steady income rolling in, even at reduced levels. Go part time with the day job (or pick up a new part time job). It reduces the financial shock, I assure you.

5. Your Own Personal Version Of The Hunger Games

Actually, these games are more like: “Am I still hungry? Did I eat all my Beefaroni? Did I lick the dust from the Ramen noodle flavor packet? I win! Or I lose! I’m so hungry I’m seeing angels!” Win or lose, expect to occasionally be hungry, both figuratively and literally. But that’s okay (as long as you don’t starve). Be hungry! Hunger to eat, hunger to pay rent, hunger to not die of exposure: all powerful motivators to force you to write. You learn a lot about things like “inspiration” and “writer’s block” when you’ll be kicked out of your apartment if you don’t put fingers to keyboards and start telling stories.

6. Like A Boss

It sounds great — “You’ll be your own boss!” You think, yeah, okay. I’ll get the executive toilet. I’ll get motherfucking foot massages. I’ll get a solid gold pen-holder that looks like a dude golfing and I stick the pen in his ass to make him putt (aka “The Putt Butt Pen Cup,” I just trademarked that shit, so, uhh, dibs). Thing is, being your own boss means you have to be your own hard-ass. Your own voice of dissent, your own chastising shadow. It means you have to be a little bit of a dick to yourself. “No Scotch before noon! No video games, and only a fifteen-minute masturbation break! Write, you little story-goblin, write!”

7. A Goal-Driven Life

Best way to be your own boss: set goals for yourself. Short-term and long-term. Set a word count goal for each day. Set aside portions of your time to hunt for jobs or seek places to submit your work. Plan to have the first draft of a novel written in three months, submitted to agents and editors or self-published by six. Plan for tomorrow, for next week, next year, and the next ten years. You can’t just wing this shit.

8. The Deadline Is The Lifeline

Deadlines you set for yourself or that are set for you by potential clients, agents, publishers, or the random jabbering machine-elves you see after you eat that moldy lunchmeat you keep finding in your fridge, will be your saving grace. Deadlines give you purpose, direction, clarity. They are a goal set externally. If someone doesn’t give you one and you’re, say, working on your own 10-book space opera cycle about Laser Moons and Star Dragons, set your own deadline. Put it on the calendar. Work toward it daily.

9. Tumble Outta Bed And Stumble To The Kitchen

…and pour yourself a cup of whisk… er, ambition! One thing, though: full-time writing isn’t a 9-to-5 job. It isn’t 40 hours a week. Sometimes it’s 30 hours a week. Sometimes it’s 60. Sometimes it means working on weekends. The luxury of being able to tell stories for a living means sacrificing some of that expected schedule. But hey, fuck it, you can nap on the job if you want and nobody’s going to fire you.

10. Hannibal, Mr. T, Face, And That Other Guy — Rorschach?

The full-time writer appears to undertake his mad crusade alone: out there on the bow of an empty ship, slicing stories into clouds with his épée. But you need a team. You might need a CPA to do your taxes, a lawyer to handle intellectual property issues, an agent to sell your rights, and further, self-published authors may need editors and cover artists and e-book designers, oh my. You can customize your team further: beta readers! Whiskey tasters! Ego-strokers! Frothing zealots! Choose your squad wisely. Full-time authoring is a gore-caked, blood-soaked, viscera-entangled battle for your very soul. Or at least for next month’s cable bill.

11. The Cup Should Rattle With Coins

Save up. Repeat: save up. Save your motherfucking money. Pile it in heaps and sit on it like a dragon nesting on his hoard. Money from writing will come, but it comes slow, unsteady, and inconsistent (insert crass joke about ejaculating). You don’t get a weekly check. You go into a full-time writing job with nary two pennies to rub together, you just dicked yourself hard. You’ll be eating your pets in no time.

12. “Is There A Line Item For Internet Porn?”

Also: learn to budget. Because the money you get comes in in fits and starts, you have to know you can pay your bills over the next many moons before the next check comes rolling in. Make sure you can pay your electric bill before you go buying some other fun-time bullshit. Pay ahead if you must. Pragmatism. Stability.

13. More Fun Financial Realities That Will Poke You With A Pointy Stick!

Taxes are going to be a knee to the groin. Some clients won’t pay on time and you have to turn into an asshole to get your money. Contracts will sometimes read like they were written in Aramaic, then translated to German, then mangled by an insane spam-bot. People will try to take advantage of you and your time. Financial institutions will barely consider you a human being. Stay out of debt because debt will shank you in the shower when you least expect it — credit card debt is in particular to be avoided. Credit cards are like little nasty Horcruxes or Sauron-infused Hobbit bait. So tempting to use. And a bad idea all around.

14. Critical Care For Your Lumpy Slugabed Body

Bold statement time: if you cannot afford health care — even bare bones bottom-dollar health care — then you may not be ready to go full-time with the writing gig. You need health care. If something happens to you — pneumonia! lung collapse! sucking chest wound! gored by a coked-up water buffalo! — and you don’t have health care, the debt you will take upon your shoulders will make Earth-wielding Atlas get the pee-shivers. It’s not nice, it’s not fair, but it is what it is: take not your health nor medical care for granted.

15. The Paradigm Shift Of Pay-For-Play

Ahh. The old day-job. When you could, conceivably, rise to the level of your own incompetence and sit around watching funny cat videos all day long and still get paid for it. Ha ha! Sucker. Those days are gone. You’ve now entered into a more pure relationship between effort and compensation, as in, the more effort you put into something, the more work you put out, which means the more money you earn. Fail to work? Fail to create? Then you fail to get paid. On the one hand, this is really cool: your every word matters. You can calculate how much you must write to buy coffee, pay for dinner, rent a van-load of strippers. On the other hand, it means you don’t get vacation days. You don’t get sick days. A day you don’t work is a day that accumulates nothing toward your needs. You’re the hunter, now. You don’t hunt? You don’t eat.

16. The Lie Of The Romantic Writer Life

Get shut of your illusions regarding a full-time writer’s life. Last week I told you about the Lies Writers Tell, but this is one I didn’t put on there — the writer’s life is needlessly romanticized. It’s not Parisian cafes and staring at clouds. It’s not wistful pondering and perfecting the Great Novel that we have within us. It’s pantsless and desperate and you grab lunch when you can and guzzle coffee because it’s there and you’re surrounded by papers and email feels like drowning and are those jizz tissues and why are my fingers blistered and bloody OH YEAH IT’S ALL THIS STORYMAKING. Nary a whiff of romance to it. But it’s still pretty bad-ass to do this for a living. So, stop complaining.

17. “But They Shall Not Take. . . My Wristwatch”

Working on your own there is a propensity to let time fritter away, whether by your own hand or at the behest of others (“Well, you’re at home, can’t you grout the bathroom?”). You will sometimes need to defend your time with sword and shield, with tooth and nail, with mecha-grizzly and cyborg-puma.

18. A Horse Of Every Color

The name of the game is diversity. It is no longer easy to survive as a full-time writer splashing around in only one pool. It’s hard to be Just A Novelist. Hard to be Only A Screenwriter. See this hat rack? WEAR THEM ALL OR STARVE. You’ll write blogs and articles and books and movies and games and secret vampire erotica and recipes and — well, whatever it takes to keep doing what you do. This is part of the “freelance penmonkey” moniker I assume — I’m ink-for-hire, man, I’m a rogue word-merc out on the fringe. And this diversity is what helps me survive.

19. The Slow-But-Steady Burn Of Self-Publishing

Self-publish. Do it. Seriously. Don’t do only it, but do it. Here’s why: first, while there’s no advance, you get a great return on the per book (especially if you also sell direct). Second, it’s steady money. Traditional publishing has a lot of value (and you should do it, too), but it’s freakishly slow sometimes. Write a book, edit, agent, publisher, pub edits, and on the schedule a year down the line. Self-pub starts to pay out slow and steady right from the beginning. Having it as part of your arsenal of penmonkey weapons speaks to that “diversity” thing I was just talking about. (Related: “25 Things About Self-Publishing“)

20. Kickstarter My Heart

If you’ve got fans, you could try Kickstarter. I’ll do a post on Kickstarter eventually but for now it’s worth mentioning that it is not and should not be treated as a Gold Rush or as easy money or as a guarantee. But it is an option for a penmonkey with some fans and an ability to throw together an interesting campaign on a story that might not otherwise exist without audience intervention.

21. Know The Many Faces Of Your Income

Know how royalties work? Or advances? Or per/word work-for-hire? How about rights? Or how Amazon pays out via KDP? You’ve got many options to earn out with writing, and it helps to have those options sliced and diced like an autopsy victim on your authorial desk. You also might earn some coin with speaking engagements, teaching opportunities, consulting gigs, hobo hand-jobs, feats of drunken heroism, etc.

22. Know The Value Of Your Work

That value is not “zero.” That value is not “cheap.” You know what’s cheap? Taco Bell. You know what’s free? Titty twisters. Chalupa diarrhea and nipple pain does not a writer career make. That’s not to say free and cheap can’t be part of your overall strategy. They can. But they are not the sum total of said strategy. Also: don’t write for exposure. There’s a reason getting caught outside and perishing is called “dying from exposure.” I mean, it’s probably a different reason, but shut up, it works metaphorically.

23. Shakespeare Got To Get Paid, Son

Nothing else needs to be said on that one.

24. Didn’t I Mention Wearing Lots Of Hats?

Diversity also means taking on other tasks as a writer: you are no longer just penmonkey; now you’re in marketing and advertising and publishing and editing and all that shit. Gone are the days when an author writes one book a year, sends it off to his publisher, and lets them carry the burden while he rolls around on a bean-bag stuffed fat with cash. Sad and perhaps not fair, but if you were waiting around for life to be fair, you might as well also wish on a star for a leprechaun to come and tickle your perineum with a dodo feather. Assemble many talents. Be like the Swiss Army Knife.

25. ABW

PUT THAT COFFEE DOWN. Coffee is for writers only. Ahem. Sorry. ABW: Always Be Writing. It’s easy to lose that in the full-time writing career — easy to fall prey to emails, to agent-hunting and marketing your books and doing book tours or whatever it is you need to do. The thing to remember is all must be subservient to the content. Be generative. Create. All else is slave to that; your writing is not slave to anything. The most important hat you wear, the most bad-ass motherfucking weapon in your authorial arsenal, is your work. Your stories are your world; they’re what help you do this thing that you love.

57 comments

Thanks, Chuck. I needed this. I just posted something on my blog explaining my writing absence and my desire to get back to it. Being a full time writer is pipe dream, to be sure. I’d settle for getting paid once. Baby steps. I feel good, I feel great, I feel wonderful…A Fool’s Paradise
A writer’s most nefarious enemy is his own brain.

Another top 25 list worthy of your penmonkey moniker.
Though my mecha grizzlies are but cubs now, they are growing–and someday I’ll write full-time. Hard? Sure. But, like you said, badass. And isn’t the elusive chalice of immortal badassery the point of life?

Could we add persistence and luck? And that the persistence increases the luck? I’m thinking of a marvelous wordsmith like James Kunstler, who spent decades digging post holes, slinging hash, and writing feature stories to earn a copper or two while he wrote novels. Meanwhile, people who wouldn’t know a well-crafted sentence from a dog turd sandwich earned nice money cranking out literary pink slime. So concentrate on the persistence. Once you start pondering the luck of others, you will only drive yourself crazy.

Thanks for another nice and well thought out list.
I really like that you mention #4 & #14. Luckily I live in a country where you still can get healthcare benefits with your part-time/day job.

Talking about skills…
It seems that a lot of people who write as a hobby or are still on the way to become a fulltime writer, forget to organize their work in an efficient manner. A couple of weeks ago you posted about your switch from the PC to your Mac as writing computer. I noticed a lot of comments from people who obviously use an utterly complicated way to create and manage text. Sure there is a lot software around for writers and creative writing nowadays, but there seems to be some kind of secret hobby for aspiring writers to procrastinate by using shiny high-tech toys.

Instead of worrying about how to sync and interact with a dozen file formats on your plethora of gadgets, just try to get comfortable with a small set of tools and write. Keep it simple and organized.

I do agree that some writers take on an exceptional, erm, burden of distraction in terms of work-flow — but that said, sometimes a complicated workflow is what gets the job done for some writers. For every writer, a different path.

Great stuff here and take it from a guy who was 100% freelance for 5 years before being forced to return to the workforce full-time: Take each point Chuck makes here, and double it.

This is especially true on the financial side. If you think you need 6 months of cash saved before you go full-time, double it. Here’s what happens: You budget like a rational, intelligent person. You get a sense of when money should arrive. And then the money doesn’t arrive. If you think it might be a week late, double it. A month? Double it. So when the money doesn’t arrive, you have to dip into savings to pay bills. Checks are chronically late, so over time you chip away at your savings even though as a writer you’re running at full capacity with freelance gigs. How does that happen? Projects move. Schedules change. Double what you expected.

in the spring of ’09 I had an entire quarter of work — three magazine features and a nonfiction book — cancelled on one Monday morning because the magazine in question (a major one that was healthy by all apparent measures) folded. Even the editor in chief didn’t know it was coming. So ask yourself: How do I replace an entire three months worth of work in…a week?

You don’t. So as you plan to make this leap, work up your worst-case professional scenario. And double it.

And believe Chuck, and me, about the health insurance. My family of five spent enough on health premiums, deductibles, and copays to buy a Honda Civic EVERY SINGLE YEAR. And no one was sick. We constantly shopped around for cheaper plans, but because 3 of the 5 of us had seen an allergist in the past 12 months for seasonal allergies, we were rejected for having pre-existing conditions.

Take this stuff seriously. Don’t skimp on the planning. Investigate the financial side of it with the effort you think it deserves, then double it. You’re not just messing with your career by going full-time freelance. You’re messing with your life and the lives of your loved ones on a very fundamental level.

Good advice all around. Having a spouse that will support you and your writing if/when you reach a point where you can make money writing is also a ridiculous plus for those little things like bills and insurance. A bit like bringing along that awesome jetpack when you jump off the writing cliff.

Like @Mike Zimmerman said, you are messing with your life and the lives of your loved ones on a very fundamental level. Even going into it eyes wide open, I’m still learning hard truths each and every day.

Even so, it beats the hell out of comfort with the soul-sucking day job that stole me away from any real writing.

So, like you said, I’m not complaining.

Yet, I wouldn’t recommend this life to the feint of heart. It ain’t for sissies.

A side note on “Know the Value of Your Work.” I was a freelancer for many years and was very fortunate to have a mentor who saved me from a costly mistake when I first went out on my own. I was kicked out of the day-job nest – got laid off the Monday after my third child’s baptism. I had about a month’s scratch in the bank, so I was desperate.

I met with an editor I’d worked with in the past first to see if he had any work I could pick up, but also to run my business plan past him. Since I was desperate, my plan was this: Sell my ass cheap. I figured once clients got a taste of my mighty pen juice, they would recognize my value and I could ramp up my rates.

He laughed in my face – literally. We were at lunch. He told me the check-cutting types who would be making the hire/don’t hire decisions often couldn’t tell good copy from what you find on used ass-wipe. They judge a writer’s worth by what he charges. If I started cheap, to their minds, I would be a cheap writer that they would hire to write cheap copy. Not only would I not make as much money, I also wouldn’t get big (i.e., lucrative) projects. No, he told me that I had the skills, that I had the references, and that I needed to suck it up, set my rates at the top end of the market and wait for the right offer.

He was right. I got work quickly, it was top-dollar work, and my rep from the get-go was as a top-of-the-market guy.

I’ve known people who didn’t benefit from that advice – who had the same business plan I’d had, figured they try the drug dealer approach, offer a more-or-less free taste, figuring clients would get hooked on their genius and cough up. A couple of them managed to scrape their way up the pay scale – but usually only by abandoning the clients they had and starting over with new ones that didn’t think of them as “cheap.” Some got stuck at the low-end of the pay scale forever, constantly grinding it out for the writer version of minimum wage. Most ended up going back into the day job system.

A caveat – setting your rate high only works if you’ve got the resume to back it up. I had experience in my industry, I had a portfolio, I had references who would back my play. Those are the kinds of things you have to gather in your larder before you strike out on your own. Skillz, as Herr Wendig say, but also marketable evidence of those skillz.

Thanks for another great post Chuck. This is the “Dream” for myself and no doubt a lot of would be wordsmiths – but reality has to come first.

I’m a long way off being able to write full-time but like to think that I’ve started my “exit strategy” after getting a short story accepted for a paying anthology. Advice like yours reassures me I’m on a reasonably realistic path. Even if it’s a really, really long one…

Working for yourself is great. You can work any 80 hours/week that you want. Not sure many folks factor the workload and general hustle into their “dream.”

The other problem: Home offices. As I once said to my daughter: “I don’t work from home. I live at work.” You never quite feel like you’re “off” — if you’re trying to decompress or just “veg out”, there’s always some work that needs doing, nagging at you. And well, you ARE at your workplace….

I was never able to swing it, but a friend of mine who at the time was working a majority of the time at home was able wrangle a cool little office space a couple blocks from his house for $100 a month. It changed his entire work life (he has a wife and 2 kids). For me when I was working at home, being present meant I was also on call to do laundry, pick up the kids, help with homework, etc, etc. You can pull a Jack Torrance and say, “whether you hear me typing, or not typing or whatever the fuck you hear me doing, when I am in here, I am working,’ but most wives these days would take the axe to Jack. Ultimately no one gives a crap that you’re “working” because EVERYONE’S busy. So yeah, I think it’s a terrific idea to have an off-site office if you can swing the extra rent, or get a sweetheart deal like my friend.

Chuck — If you’ve got an affordable option? Absolutely. Even if it’s just an outbuilding on your own property (like Neil Gaiman’s shed, for example). The idea of a separated space is critical to well-being, I think.

The no-cost option is to do the coffee-shop cliché — just to find somewhere outside of the house.

Right now, I just can’t justify the expense (office space in my town is either ridiculously priced, or way too big). I try to spend half the work week out of the house, if I can — but the whole “writing in public” thing doesn’t really work too well for me. Too easily distracted.

I love Dan O’Shea’s comment. That’s such an important point and doesn’t it apply to all of life? If you put yourself out there cheaply you will be taken for cheap. I don’t have the professional experience to back up a large hourly rate but I won’t work for free and I won’t work for super cheap either. Finding where you belong on that scale is important.

This was a kick start.
The kind kind.
You get the punch in the face wake up call.
Then you get the 10 minute belly laugh one which brings into question the possible need for incontinence pad.
I have not laughed so hard for a million years.

I’ve read several places that getting an out door hobby will help with the ‘trapped at the office’ feeling. I’m not a professional writer yet but I do try to write as often as possible but between work, kids, wife, and writing I do get that burn out going at times. So, I like to take the Muse for a quick spin on the bicycle two or three times a week.

Also, I always read about your number 25 (ABW) but what do you always write? Ok I know that sounds odd from a writer but I’ve always wondered what a ‘professional’ writer writes in his/her ‘spare’ time. Do you have some crazy odd story you quietly work on from time to time? I tend to do blog posts but I also have three stories in the work. My mood sort of dictates which one I work on. As a paid professional can you afford to do that?

Excellent advice. I’ve been a freelance journalist for four years and love telling people that I get to write for a living.

What I don’t generally tell them is that for the 16 preceding years I worked for various and sundry publications (mostly newspapers), produced good stuff, met deadlines, won awards, earned street cred, and got to know editors and publishers and owners. That way, when I went out on my own, the people who assigned the stories (and signed the checks) knew me and knew my work, so it wasn’t (as much of) an uphill struggle to get enough work.

So like Chuck said, you don’t just decide to become a writer. And hey, REALLY listen to him about budgeting and credit cards!!! The man speaks truth.

So I just completed my first novel yesterday (104K words) and I was thanking my boyfriend, my sister and an author-friend, but I also should have thanked you. Not to get all sappy and shit, but your stuff (especially 25 Ways to Unfuck Your Story) really helped me make it through. Oh, and one of my personal favs of yours is the Butternuts Squash Soup recipe. As a food blog fiend, I highly endorse more posts like that

Gotta admit – I’m not really on the precipice of plunging into full time writing, and a sizeable chunk of it is because of things you list here (financial included). But I do still want to get some work out there (for sale) and there are lots of good reminders in here and a kick in the pants (ABW) that is definitely needed. My hiatuses (hiati?) seem to go on too long, and the simple solution is just to never take a break. Like a shark. Looking for a whale. Who is looking for your day job boss.

Yeah, I have a few “projects” on my computer in long lost directories all with a beginning, start of a middle and no end and with no end in site may day job keeps repeating eat, work stare at wall pretending it is a window, eat work. Thanks for highlighting the concept of goals I have heard of them but haven’t tried them yet.